Jack Cochran and Matthew James welcome Kintan Brahmbhatt, CEO and co-founder of Olto, to discuss how AI agents are fundamentally reshaping the presales workflow and buyer experience. Drawing from over 12 years at Amazon building personalized experiences for Alexa, Amazon Music, and Prime Video, Kintan explores why B2B buyers receive generic "Acme Corp" demos while B2C consumers get highly personalized recommendations, and how product-trained agents can finally close this gap economically. The conversation goes beyond productivity gains to examine how buyers, products, and SE roles have evolved rapidly while metrics, compensation plans, and tooling have remained static.

• Connect with Jack Cochran: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackcochran/

• Connect with Matthew James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewyoungjames/

• Connect with Kintan Brahmbhatt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kintan/

• Join Presales Collective Slack: https://www.presalescollective.com/slack

• Sol/Con 2026 (Chicago, August 2026): https://www.presalescollective.com/solcon-2026

• Olto: https://olto.com/psc (3 months free promotional offer mentioned)

1. Why AI Timing Is Better Now: Moving Beyond Productivity to Workflow Transformation

2. The Personalization Gap Between B2C and B2B Buyer Experiences

3. What Olto Is: Product-Trained AI Agents Across the Revenue Journey

4. Kintan's Amazon Background: Building Personalized Experiences at Scale

5. SE Capacity Economics and the Unspoken Rule About Qualified Deals

6. How Product-Trained Agents Differ from Generic AI

7. The New SE Workflow: Agents Handle Discovery, SEs Focus on Sense-Making

8. Evolution of SE Metrics, Compensation, and Tooling for the AI Era

9. Implementation Challenges and Change Management

10. The Future of the Presales Profession

00:00 Welcome

04:04 Now vs a year ago

05:40 What is Olto

07:52 B2C vs B2B personalization disconnect

11:15 Agent capabilities and limitations

21:35 Future of the solutions roles

28:26 Key takeaways from solutions leaders

Presales teams are being asked more and more to do post-sales work. This isn't a fad or something we're doing in the short term. This is a significant change for the broader profession of presales and solutions consulting. What was once occasional support for implementations or customer renewals is now becoming formal job responsibilities for solutions consultants across the industry.

In this episode, Jack Cochran sits down with Shamil Turner, Global Technical Solutions Leader at Figma and Presales Collective advisory board member, to explore why this shift is happening and what it means for the future of presales.

Shamil brings a unique perspective to this conversation: he was the first SE hired at Figma, built their entire solutions engineering organization from the ground up, and has now transitioned into a post-sales technical leadership role. Together they discuss the strengths that SEs bring to the table that has a profound impact on a company-customer relationships AFTER the sale has happened, and how this plays out in a new role that has been emerging over the past year, the Forward Deployed Engineer.

Whether you're a leader making organizational decisions or an IC just getting started, this conversation will help you understand how the world of solutions is evolving.

Thank you to Saleo for sponsoring this episode!

• Connect with Jack Cochran: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackcochran/

• Connect with Shamil Turner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shamil-turner/

• Join Presales Collective Slack: https://www.presalescollective.com/slack

• Sol/Con 2026 (Chicago, August 2026): https://www.presalescollective.com/solcon-2026

• Presales Collective Podcast: https://www.presalescollective.com/podcast

• Saleo: https://saleo.io

1. The Growing Trend of Presales Teams Doing Post-Sales Work

2. Historical Context: How SEs Have Always Supported Post-Sales

3. Forward Deployed Engineer Roles in Consumption-Based Models

4. Why Presales Skills Are Valuable for Customer Onboarding

5. Shamil's Journey from First SE at Figma to Global Technical Solutions Leader

6. The Convergence of Pre and Post-Sales Functions

7. Career Implications for Presales Professionals at All Levels

8. What This Means for the Future of Solutions Organizations

In this episode, Jack Cochran sits down with Darlene Volas, a senior solutions engineering executive, to explore what it truly means to be an AI-enabled SE in 2025 and beyond. The conversation moves well past basic ChatGPT usage to examine sophisticated operational workflows, custom automation tools, and practical implementation strategies that enhance both efficiency and quality of work.

This episode was recorded during Presales Collective's 2026 AI-Powered Presales Summit on March 19th, 2026. Pro and Pro+ members can view all of the recorded sessions on-demand in the PSC Knowledge Hub: https://www.presalescollective.com/knowledgehub

• Connect with Jack Cochran: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackcochran/

• Connect with Matthe James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewyoungjames/

• Connect with Darlene Volas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darlenevolas/

• Join Presales Collective Slack: https://www.presalescollective.com/slack

• Sol/Con 2026 (Chicago, August 2026): https://www.presalescollective.com/solcon-2026

• Presales Collective Podcast: https://www.presalescollective.com/podcast

• Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/

• Claude by Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/claude

• Cursor AI coding tool: https://cursor.sh/

• GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/features/copilot

• Gong conversation intelligence: https://www.gong.io/

• ChatGPT Enterprise: https://openai.com/enterprise

• Obsidian note-taking: https://obsidian.md/

• Firebolt database: https://www.firebolt.io/

1. Personal AI Usage Evolution: Moving Beyond Google Replacement to Creative Applications

2. Three Buckets of AI for SE Leaders: Operations, Team Workflows, and Technical Implementation

3. Daily Meeting Preparation Automation and Custom-Built AI Applications

4. Operationalizing SE Teams with Repeatable AI Workflows

5. Quality vs. Efficiency Trade-off: Better Preparation Rather Than Less Time

6. Building Technical Credibility Through Hands-On AI Coding

7. The "One More Thing" Problem and Where Human Expertise Remains Essential

8. Data Security, Governance, and Vendor Considerations for AI Tools

9. Why AI Won't Replace SEs: The Irreplaceable Human Element

10. Hiring AI-Native SEs: What to Look For Beyond Basic Tool Awareness

00:00 Welcome

02:41 How AI conversations have evolved

06:30 Three buckets of AI usage

12:40 Efficiency versus quality improvements

18:40 Building credibility through AI coding

21:07 The one more thing problem

30:59 Why AI won't replace SEs

36:45 Q&A session

39:20 Closing remarks